Joseph Mitchell, Chronicler of the Unsung and the Unconventional, Diesat 87

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Joseph Mitchell, whose stories about ordinary people created extraordinary journalism in the pages of The New Yorker, died of cancer yesterday at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 87 and lived in Manhattan.

At the height of his creative powers, from the 1930's to the mid-60's, Mr. Mitchell tended to avoid the standard fare of journalists: interviews with moguls, tycoons, movie stars and captains of industry. Instead, he pursued the generals of nuisance: flops, drunks, con artists, panhandlers, gin-mill owners and their bellicose bartenders, at least one flea circus operator, a man who sold racing cockroaches, a bearded lady and a fast talker who claimed to have written nine million words of "An Oral History of Our Times" when, in fact, he had written no words at all.

Mr. Mitchell was also the poet of the waterfront, of the limelight of New York's greatness as a seaport, of the Fulton Fish Market, of the clammers on Long Island and the oystermen on Staten Island: people who caught, sold and ate seafood and talked about it incessantly. One Sunday in August 1937, he placed third in a clam-eating tournament at Block Island after consuming 84 cherrystones. He regarded that, he said, as "one of the few worthwhile achievements" of his life.

For him, people were always as big as their dreams, as mellow as the ale they nursed in the shadows of McSorley's saloon off Cooper Square in the East Village. He wrote during a time when New Yorkers were mostly convinced that they were of good heart and that they had the best of intentions, whatever the rest of the world thought of their abrasivness and contentiousness. Mr. Mitchell's articles offered evidence that they were right.

When Mr. Mitchell became a staff writer of The New Yorker in 1938, the city had come through the Depression and was soon to send its sons and daughters off to fight a war. Even with the hard times and a jaded past, there was still an innocence of sorts, and an interest in the people Mr. Mitchell liked to write about as well as a tolerance for them. His nonfiction had grace and was rich with the sort of people a reader could find in Joyce or Gogol, two of the writers Mr. Mitchell admired. He was to letters what the Ashcan School had been to painting.

Mr. Mitchell arrived when the magazine's editor, Harold Ross, was giving its top nonfiction writers, among them St. Clair McKelway, A. J. Liebling and Philip Hamburger, more space and time than was available to reporters of the day. The New Yorker writers used their good fortune to advantage. In stories, "Profiles" and "Reporter at Large" articles, Mr. Mitchell helped to pioneer a special kind of reportage, setting standards to which later generations of reporters would aspire.

If his name is not as widely known as it might have been, that is mostly because for the last three decades of his life, he wrote nary a word that anybody got to see. For years, he would show up at his tiny office at The New Yorker every day and assure his colleagues that he was working on something, but that it was not quite ready.

"He told his pals he was writing about his roots in North Carolina," said Charles McGrath, who was deputy editor of The New Yorker and who is now the editor of The New York Times Book Review. "Then it became a book about his living in New York." Whatever it was, nothing of any substance emerged from his typewriter after 1965 and his friends came to think of it as an exceptionally bad case of writer's block. Mr. Mitchell had always been a perfectionist and Mr. McGrath said he suspected that Mr. Mitchell was raising his standards all the time. The janitor would find reams of copy in his wastepaper basket.

"I'm a ghost; everything's changed now," Mr. Mitchell said when he was in his 80's, adding that he had become used to being obscure.

Although Mr. Mitchell always had an extraordinary reputation among nonfiction writers and his out-of-print books were eagerly sought by collectors, he emerged from his obscurity in 1992 when the body of his work was reissued by Pantheon Books in a volume called "Up in the Old Hotel." The book was a critical and commercial success, and Mr. Mitchell said he was pleased to learn that younger readers found merit in his prose.

The centerpiece of the book was the series of articles that appeared in The New Yorker in the late 1930's and early 40's, and then was published in 1943 as "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon."

Mr. Mitchell had discovered McSorley's Old Ale House shortly after he joined The New Yorker. The saloon opened in 1854 and, as the oldest continuously run institution of its kind in New York, immediately endeared itself to Mr. Mitchell. He loathed most forms of progress and technology and so did the succession of people who drank in McSorley's.

"It is equipped with electricity," he wrote of it, "but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls -- one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves -- and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox."

And what of the service?

"It is a drowsy place; the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the walls have not been in agreement for many years. "

Who went to such a place?

"The backbone of the clientele is a rapidly thinning group of crusty old men, predominantly Irish, who have been drinking there since they were youths and now have a proprietary feeling about the place. Some of them have tiny pensions, and are alone in the world; they sleep in Bowery hotels and spend practically all their waking hours in McSorley's."

When Mr. Mitchell started writing such pieces about New York, the people who were then old could remember the draft riots of 1863, the various financial panics, the huzzahs that accompanied the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the sorrow that attended the death of John McSorley, the original owner of the saloon, in 1910.

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It is not possible to determine who the most memorable person was in Mr. Mitchell's stories, but there were many who rivaled the regulars of McSorley's.

There was Commodore Dutch, who somehow convinced rich and unrich alike that they should go to his annual charity ball, which he gave to benefit himself. "I haven't got a whole lot of sense," the Commodore told Mr. Mitchell, "but I got too much sense to work."

There was Arthur Samuel Colborne, who announced in 1941 that he had not uttered "a solitary profane word since a Sunday morning in the winter of 1886." He was so pleased with himself that he started the Anti-Profanity League and took to touring bars in Yorkville, preaching against the sin of swearing. "You start out with 'hell,' 'devil take it,' 'Dad burn it,' 'Gee whizz,' and the like of that, and by and by you won't be able to open your trap without letting loose an awful, awful blasphemous oath," Mr. Colborne told Mr. Mitchell. Mr. Colborne felt he had just about eliminated profanity in the saloons of Yorkville, but not without a price, since Mr. Colborne had to quaff a great deal of beer while spreading the word. His story, entitled "The Don't Swear Man," ran in the magazine in 1941.

There was a ragged old man who said he was "John S. Smith of Riga, Latvia, Europe" who began hitchhiking around the United States in 1934, virtually peniless. Every time a benefactor gave him a free cup of coffee or a little soup, he would give him a check for hundreds, even thousands of dollars drawn on the Irving National Bank of New York, which had gone out of business in 1923. Mr. Mitchell wrote: "I began to think of the vain hopes he raised in the breasts of the waitresses who had graciously given him hundreds of meals and the truck drivers who had hauled him over a hundred highways, and to feel that about John S. Smith of Riga, Latvia, Europe, there is something a little sinister."

And there was Joseph Ferdinand Gould, who had graduated from Harvard in 1911 and come to New York, not long after he left an archeological expedition in which he measured the skulls of the remains of 1,500 Chippewa and Mandan Indians in North Dakota. He took to hanging around Greenwich Village coffee shops, where with no provocation he would do an imitation of a sea gull. Indeed, he claimed to have mastered sea gull language and had reached the point where he was about to translate Longfellow into it.

Joe Gould persuaded almost everybody who was anybody that he was writing an "Oral History of Our Times." He carried around paper bags that many believed contained his research but that, in reality, merely contained other paper bags and a few ratty newspaper clips. He lamented that he was the last bohemian and all the others he had known had fallen by the wayside. "Some are in the grave," he said, "some are in the loony bin and some are in the advertising business."

Malcolm Cowley admired him and so did E. E. Cummings. William Saroyan gave him alcohol and Ezra Pound trusted him.

It was not until 1964, 21 years since his first New Yorker profile of Mr. Gould and 7 years after Mr. Gould's death in a psychiatric hospital (death came as he was doing a sea gull imitation), that Mr. Mitchell told his readers the truth: that whatever the "Oral History" was, it reposed in Mr. Gould's noggin. Mr. Mitchell's first story about Mr. Gould, entitled "Professer Sea Gull," ran in 1943. The final Joe Gould articles, which appeared in 1964, were Mr. Mitchell's last signed contributions to The New Yorker. Two of his books, "The Bottom of the Harbor" and "Joe Gould's Secret," were recently published in Modern Library editions.

Reviewing 'Up in the Old Hotel," for The New York Times Book Review, Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote: "Mr. Mitchell always mediates the sadness such subjects bring -- the loss of time, the life slipping by, the way the old manners fail to hang on -- and he lets the reader feel only the pleasure that comes from his own very personal discoveries. He himself remains, in this prose at least, a melancholy man, wandering with a sandwich in his pocket among the wildflowers in abandoned cemeteries, seeking the company of solitary men who are gregarious only in the company of other isolates, sniffing out the odors of the Fulton Fish Market and its old hotels. And in such moments the reader gets a glimpse of Mr. Mitchell himself, even as he seems to disappear into the scene he describes."

Joseph Mitchell was born July 27, 1908, on his Parker grandparents' farm near Iona, N.C., the son of Averette Nance and Elizabeth A. Parker Mitchell. His family was in the cotton and tobacco trading business. Mr. Mitchell studied at the University of North Carolina from 1925 to 1929. He sent an article he had written on tobacco to The New York Herald Tribune, which liked it so much that it published it and summoned him to New York in 1929. Over the next nine years, he wrote for The Herald Tribune, The Morning World and The World-Telegram, the paper that first sent him to the Fulton Fish Market.

Mr. Mitchell married Therese Dagny Jacobsen in 1931. She died in 1980. He is survived by his companion, Sheila McGrath; two children from his first marriage, Nora Sanborn of Eatontown, N.J., and Elizabeth Curtis of Atlanta; three granddaughters; two grandsons, and one great-granddaughter.

Mr. Mitchell also wrote some fictional pieces about North Carolina, among them "The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County" (1939); "I Blame It All on Mama" (1940), and "Uncle Dockery and the Independent Bull" (1939). A work of nonfiction, "The Mohawks in High Steel," about American Indians who worked on steel bridges and skyscrapers, was published in The New Yorker, then used as the introduction to Edmund Wilson's "Apologies to the Iroquois."

In a 1992 interview, Mr. Mitchell reminisced about New York and The New Yorker and how both had changed. He wasn't opposed to change, he said, but it was clear that his heart remained with the New York of Fiorello La Guardia and The New Yorker of Harold Ross.

"At the old New Yorker, the people were wonderful writers," he said. "A lot of us would go to lunch together: Liebling and Perelman and Thurber, who was idiosyncratic and funny. Now, everybody goes in and out. I go to lunch at the Grand Central Oyster Bar and eat by myself."

Correction: An obituary on Saturday about the writer Joseph Mitchell referred incorrectly to his marriage, and the list of survivors omitted his siblings. He was married only once, to Therese Dagny Jacobsen, who died in 1980. A sister, Linda Mitchell Lamm, lives in Wilson, N.C., and a brother, Harry Mitchell, in Fairmont, N.C. An obituary on Saturday about the writer Joseph Mitchell referred incorrectly to his marriage, and the list of survivors omitted his siblings. He was married only once, to Therese Dagny Jacobsen, who died in 1980. A sister, Linda Mitchell Lamm, lives in Wilson, N.C., and a brother, Harry Mitchell, in Fairmont, N.C.

A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on May 25, 1996, on Page 1001012 of the National edition with the headline: Joseph Mitchell, Chronicler of the Unsung and the Unconventional, Diesat 87. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe